With no primary threats, Christie and Buono make tracks on campaign trail

View full sizeState Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Middlesex) is the only major Democrat taking on Gov. Chris Christie in November.file photos

TRENTON — How’s this for March Madness? The general election campaign for governor has begun.

With more than seven months to go, the field is already set and Gov. Chris Christie and his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Barbara Buono, are busy snapping up endorsements and exchanging brickbats in hopes of rousing voters still in recovery from presidential politics.

Neither candidate has to contend with a serious primary challenge — a situation that is unheard of in Jersey’s modern political history.

As a result, the early game of one-on-one heated up last week.

On Tuesday, Christie charmed older voters and picked up the seal of approval from the Orthodox Jewish establishment in Lakewood, while Buono also wooed seniors and hit the diner circuit in Newark with Mayor Cory Booker by her side. All the while, press releases streamed from the campaigns.

“This is like September, not like March,” Brigid Harrison, a political science professor at Montclair State University, said. “It’s like this swirling vortex of one-upmanship. It will probably be on par with the presidential campaign, it’s going to be all campaign all the time.”

Although it’s early, Buono — who has been in the state Legislature almost 20 years — suffers from low name recognition, a challenge that some say she can surmount by hitting “go” in the months before the June 4 primary. It also helps that she doesn’t have to burn through cash on an intra-party fight.

“It’s clearly good that she doesn’t have to spend any money on a primary, fighting with the Democrats, that’s the best thing,” Ben Dworkin, a political science professor at Rider University, said. “She can focus all her attention and all her money on her organization and her eventual opponent, Chris Christie.”

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The fact of the matter, said Patrick Murray, a political scientist at Monmouth University, is that voters won’t start paying attention until Labor Day.

“The voters aren’t listening,” Murray said. “A competitive primary in some ways is more useful because at least there’s something of a campaign, even if you have to spend some money and knock some heads in order to do it."

Taking on Christie, a Republican presidential contender with a formidable national profile, could go either way for Buono. Every time he makes news — and that’s often — she has an opportunity to counter his message, but every hour she spends at a news conference is an hour she’s not raising sorely needed campaign cash.

Buono has $1 million so far, thanks to $684,297 in public matching funds. In contrast, Christie’s jaunts to Florida, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Wisconsin — Texas is penciled in for April — have helped him accumulate more than $5 million. He has said he won’t take state money for the primary, but has yet to indicate what he plans to do about the general election.

It has always been a challenge to run a campaign in New Jersey because a candidate has to spend $1 million a week to make ads count in the costly television markets of New York and Philadelphia.

Today more than ever, former Gov. Jim Florio said, the burden of raising enough money to run a statewide race scares off even candidates who might have had a shot. Before Florio won the 1981 Democratic nomination, he entered a crowded Democratic primary field in 1977.

“Nobody was so outgunned that they didn’t think they had a chance of winning,” he said. “Now I suspect serious candidates who see that they’re outmanned, outgunned, outspent, who don’t have the resources, regard it as a suicidal mission and therefore don’t take on the initiative.”

Former Gov. Tom Kean, who is now a revered figure in the state, was not very well-known when he lost the 1977 Republican primary, even though he had been Assembly speaker and was on the front page of newspapers several times a week.

“There are just so many hands you can shake and so many babies you can kiss, so to speak, and hope to get yourself well known,” said Carl Golden, who was press secretary to Kean and later to another Republican, Gov. Christie Whitman. “It’s very hard in this state, very difficult.”

Golden said Buono needs to zero in on a few issues, a la former Gov. Jim McGreevey’s single-minded focus on property taxes and automobile insurance in 1997. In addition to pushing a message about Christie’s economic record, she has to pick what Golden called “targets of opportunity,” like last week’s flareup over gay “conversion therapy.”

The popular and politically astute governor — trying to walk a fine line between a moderate New Jersey electorate and a more conservative national audience — said he opposed the use of the controversial therapy. The previous day he failed to stake out a position on the issue, and Buono pounced, saying his indecision was akin to “dignifying” the practice.

“That’s sort of being a thorn in your side, not a dagger at your throat, and I think (Buono) needs the latter more than the former,” Golden said.

But her attention to the matter — and what Christie might call a mischaracterization of his views on gay issues — forced him to issue a statement saying he believes sexual orientation is determined at birth.

Shortly before he made the comments on conversion therapy that put the issue on CNN and sent his staff scrambling, Christie stood before a backdrop of schoolchildren in Stone Harbor and waxed poetic about how easy he was taking it these days.

“I don’t feel the campaign has begun in earnest for me,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be campaigning for this job. It’s seven days a week. I’m not there yet.”